In 1978, Scott Glenn, the actor who plays Stick on Netflix's Daredevil and The Defenders, left Hollywood after a forgettable decade working in TV and moved with his wife and two young daughters to Ketchum, Idaho. He was 37 and figured he'd work as a bartender and a hunting-guide apprentice and maybe do Shakespeare in the Park in Boise. They'd already spent the summer in Idaho—after much prodding from his wife, Carol, a ceramic artist, who was accepted to a summer program there—where the family, according to Glenn, "fell in love with each other all over again."
Less than three weeks after renting an A-frame house in Ketchum, Glenn's career took a sharp turn. An old Marine buddy was shooting a movie in Mexico and cast Glenn for a small role that paid $2,000. Emboldened by the money in his pocket and the sense of ease he felt over moving to Idaho, Glenn and Carol swung through L.A. after the film wrapped on their way back to Ketchum, paying a visit to their old friend James Bridges. During the brief stopover, Bridges told Glenn he was about to start shooting a movie in Texas and that he was perfect for the villain role opposite John Travolta. All it would require from Glenn is an audition.
Fuck that, Glenn told him. After a decade in Hollywood—much of it spent on a soap opera—Glenn was done going to someone's office to audition. He lived in Idaho now, had two grand in his pocket and a friend who was going to teach him how to be a hunting guide. Scott and Carol then beat it back to Ketchum.
But Bridges wanted Glenn for the role. He called him in Idaho and told him to get his ass to Houston. "If you take this role," he told Glenn, "you'll never have to audition for another part again." Glenn was interested, but wanted to do it his way, declining a plane ticket from the studio, Paramount, and instead driving the 2,000 miles to Texas in his truck. Glenn hung out for weeks in Houston until, on the day before Urban Cowboy started filming, he was given the role of Wes Hightower, an ex-con bull rider.
Within weeks he was getting offers for starring roles and his career quickly accelerated, leading to roles in The Right Stuff, The Silence of the Lambs, and dozens of other movies—from indie films to the Jason Bourne franchise. Now 76, Glenn, who recounts this story on an early August evening in New York (where he and Carol split their time between Idaho), is experiencing a late-career surge thanks to a handful of television shows: HBO's The Leftovers, which finished its third and final season his spring, Daredevil and The Defenders, and the forthcoming Castle Rock on Hulu.
"The lesson is: If you're lucky enough to be married to a smart, tough, Jewish girl from Brooklyn, listen to her," he says. "If she says, 'We're moving to Idaho,' don't question it, just do it."
Glenn is recognizable because of his many film roles, but now he's recognized by legions of young fans around the world.
"We were in Melbourne, Australia," Glenn says, "and every day anywhere from a half a dozen to 20 or 30 people would say, 'Hey, Stick!' I don't think any of them know Scott Glenn."
Glenn didn't grow up with dreams of being an internationally known Hollywood star. He wanted to be a writer. After a stretch in the Marine Corps, Glenn became a newspaper reporter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, working the crime beat before packing off to New York, where he took an acting class with the sole purpose of learning how to write dialogue—at which, a friend had told him, he was no good. During his first class at Berghof Studio in the Village, Glenn had a sudden and profound realization. "Holy shit," he thought. "I'm an actor."
"My life made sense to me," he says, describing the moment. "I knew it right away and it blindsided me because I didn't grow up with any great dreams of acting."
Glenn stumbled out of the class onto a rainy New York street, found a pay phone, and called his parents to tell them he'd given up journalism and was now committed to acting. His father gave him this advice: Don't give yourself any deadlines—don't say if I haven't made it in four years I'm going to do something else. If you love it, make it your life. "It was perfect advice," Glenn says all these years later.
The move to Idaho wasn't so much about giving up acting, he explains, but returning to it. "I started thinking about getting back to what my dreams were before I got to Los Angeles, which is: How do you make characters work?"
Glenn throws himself into his characters with a relentless preparation. In the early '80s, he taught himself to be a righty to play astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff. For Stick, a blind sensai, Glenn committed to an exercise called peripheral feeling, in which you take in only the information on the outer rims of your vision, not what's directly in front of you. He followed this practice for the two weeks of shooting that went into his episode in Season One of Daredevil, which included a memorable fight scene between Stick and the titular hero.
Those fight scenes in Daredevil and The Defenders require intense physical training—which suits Glenn, who works out with knives, rides motorcycles, spear fishes in the Pacific Ocean, and is, just generally, a bad ass. At one point during our interview, Glenn, who has a lean and muscular frame, gets down on all fours to demonstrate a portion of his daily workout routine, which his son-in-law, a former Navy SEAL, taught him. It's a low crawl, the kind of thing you'd see soldiers perform as they maneuver through an obstacle course. Glenn does this in the middle of an art exhibit.
The rest of his daily workout routine consists of laying on his back and turning himself over using one leg five times in one direction, then again with the other leg, then an arm and the other arm. Then he does between 130 and 140 paces in the low crawl position.
"Someone asked me what part of the body is the most important to be strong," he says, unprompted. "It's the big toe. The big toe especially, and the inner front-third of your feet, are what give you balance and will make you infinitely better at any sport, any physical activity and as you get older will keep you from falling."
Glenn calls this relentless focus on staying in shape tenacity—and it stems from advice both his father, during that phone call on the day he became an actor, and, much later, the acting legend Laurence Olivier impressed upon him. Glenn once asked Olivier what skill actors need most to succeed. "My dear boy," Olivier told him, "you must develop strong jaw muscles, learn how to bite on, and not let go." In other words, Glenn says, tenacity—a trait that pours out of him.
While Glenn speaks with a certain giddiness about Stick, his sinewy frame and eagerness to discuss workout routines belies another, more interesting trait: Glenn is a deeply philosophical man. This becomes apparent when he talks about playing Kevin Garvey Sr. in The Leftovers.
The Damon Lindelof-led show, adapted from a book by Tom Perrotta, deals with the aftermath of a global tragedy, in which 2% of the world's population suddenly disappears without explanation. Glenn plays a crazy person—or maybe a modern-day prophet, or maybe both—who heads off to Australia on a wild vision quest. An entire episode in Season Three was dedicated to Glenn's character, including a seven-page monologue, the longest of Lindelof's career.
"The Leftovers is my favorite job I've ever had in my life, anywhere, ever," he says. "It is one of the greatest TV shows ever made."
Although The Leftovers was a critical darling, it failed to earn any major Emmy nominations for its writers, directors, and cast. (Ann Down, who played Patti Levin, is the sole outlier, earning a nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series this year.) I asked him about this Emmy snub, to which he simply replies: "Not enough people saw it."
The show's challenging conceit—a possible reason why it failed to gather momentum in the same way as Game of Thrones or Westworld—is what attracted Glenn in the first place. "I remember when we started the show, I asked Damon, 'What is this all about?' And he said, 'What I want is for the people in the audience to ask themselves very deeply the answers to certain questions: what does it mean when you say the word family? What is the origin of religion?' How many show start in that deep a place? Not many."
In a previous interview, Glenn said he related to Kevin Garvey Sr. because he is someone who had purpose in life and then lost it. I ask Glenn about this, and he spends several minutes dissecting the character's motives. I put it to him again: But what is your purpose?
"It's waking up in the morning and looking in the mirror and seeing some kind of an artist and a hero," he says, before going quiet for more than a minute.
"Someone asked me if I believe in God," he says, breaking the silence, "and I said, 'Yes I do,' and they asked me, 'Well what's he like?' And I said, 'He?' … As human beings we anthropomorphize way too much. God's not a person. God, for me, is a power that lies outside the definition of time and space. Every once and a while, when the curtain rises, I hope to connect with whatever it is in me that's part of that."
When did you find that purpose? I ask.
Again, a long pause.
"I started to find that purpose in the basement of Berghof studios, when acting discovered me, and a few short weeks after that, meeting Carol and having two daughters and now having grandkids and feeling like all of those connections are made valuable with the thread that makes us all the same."
It's the kind of observation that can only come from someone with Glenn's vantage point—that of a long, successful career and a close-knit family spanning generations. But make no mistake: Glenn is hardly finished. With projects in the works, and the energy and grit of a man a fraction of his age, he'll be recognizable for some time to come. And when it's all over, there's always Idaho.
Lead image: Leather jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren. T-shirt by Sunspel. Trousers by Polo Ralph Lauren. Shirt by Polo Ralph Lauren (R). Jewelry Scott's own.
Photography by Tyler Joe
